Automattic's New Board Includes a Sci-Fi Author and Two Founders of a Bot-Plagued Startup

A Post-Coup Reshuffle at WordPress's Parent

Matt Mullenweg informed Automattic staff on Friday that he has seated a new board of directors, ending weeks of speculation after he reversed an attempted ouster in early September. The composition is striking: it includes Hugh Howey, the bestselling author behind the Silo dystopian series, and Henry Khachatryan and Krutal Desai, who co-founded IRL, a social app that collapsed in 2023 after investigators determined nearly its entire user base consisted of automated bots rather than real people.

Automattic is the parent entity of WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, and several other web infrastructure platforms. The board announcement arrives as the final chapter of a governance crisis that saw Mullenweg placed on leave for 33 hours before he reclaimed control using his 84 per cent voting stake and removed or accepted resignations from the directors who moved against him.

Who Sits on the Reconstituted Board

Mullenweg disclosed the new lineup through the company's internal Slack announcements channel. Beyond Howey, Khachatryan, and Desai, the roster includes Amy Chan, author of Breakup Bootcamp, who recently amplified Mullenweg's social media post about Automattic's AI website builder, Spacefast.

Howey and Mullenweg walked portions of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Spain together in 2018. Mullenweg described Khachatryan as a longtime collaborator with the late technology writer Om Malik and the website builder for journalist Nick Bilton.

The inclusion of Khachatryan and Desai is the most eyebrow-raising element. IRL shut down after an investigation commissioned by SoftBank, one of its investors, revealed that 95 per cent of its claimed users were bots. The co-founders, including then-CEO Abraham Shafi, later sued SoftBank and other backers; SoftBank had already filed securities fraud claims against the company. Neither Khachatryan nor Desai faced personal fraud charges, but the collapse cast a long shadow over their track record as operators.

Automattic has also brought in three new advisers: Jaime Waydo, formerly chief technology officer at Whoop, the wearables firm; Matt Van Horn, co-founder of June, an analytics platform; and Hiten Shah, who co-founded KISSmetrics, a product analytics company acquired in 2018.

The 33-Hour Interregnum

The previous Automattic board voted in early September to place Mullenweg on paid administrative leave. The move was intended to lead to his removal from the board entirely, but Mullenweg invoked his supermajority voting control to reverse the decision. In his internal message to staff after retaking control, Mullenweg wrote that the board had acted "without advance warning and without giving me a meaningful opportunity to understand or respond to their concerns before they acted. I was denied even a brief extension to consult with independent legal counsel."

Three directors departed in the aftermath. Toni Schneider, a founding CEO of Automattic who now leads Bluesky, resigned. Sue Decker, a former Yahoo president, also stepped down. Mullenweg removed General Ann Dunwoody, the first woman to achieve four-star rank in the US Army, from the board. He also terminated chief financial officer Mark Davies, who had been designated to serve as interim CEO, and chief legal officer Andy Missan.

In his announcement to staff this week, Mullenweg wrote that "for purposes of Delaware law, I am the CEO, President, Treasurer, and Secretary," consolidating all executive titles in his own name. He added that the attempted removal had brought "many amazing supporters" into Automattic's orbit and remarked that the new board meeting was "the most interesting board meeting in a decade (since the Woo acquisition)."

The WP Engine Shadow

The previous board never publicly articulated its rationale for trying to place Mullenweg on leave. One plausible catalyst is the legal fight between Automattic and WP Engine, a managed WordPress hosting provider. Mullenweg has accused WP Engine of trademark infringement and insufficient contribution to the WordPress open source project; WP Engine has countersued, alleging abuse of control over WordPress.org infrastructure.

Court filings in July show that WP Engine's legal team accused Mullenweg of destroying evidence. After returning to the CEO seat, Mullenweg replaced Automattic's litigation counsel with Susman Godfrey, a trial firm known for high-stakes commercial disputes. The timing suggests the board may have viewed Mullenweg's conduct in the WP Engine matter as a liability, though no director has confirmed that hypothesis on the record.

Mullenweg posted on X in mid-September, "Founder advice: If you don't have a coup attempt every few years, you're not hiring strong enough leaders." The quip encapsulates his public posture since the reversal: defiant, unbowed, and framing internal dissent as a sign of executive strength rather than governance dysfunction.

What the Composition Signals

At Opentechwire, we have tracked dozens of venture-backed companies through governance crises. The common pattern is that boards reconstituted after a failed ouster tend to include loyalists with limited experience in the company's core sector, precisely because independent directors with domain expertise are more likely to challenge the founder. Automattic's new board fits that template.

Howey has no background in software infrastructure or internet platforms; his expertise is narrative fiction and self-publishing. Chan's domain is consumer psychology and relationship coaching. Khachatryan and Desai bring startup operating experience, but their most prominent venture ended in a bot fraud scandal. None of the four has a public track record in open source governance, content moderation at scale, or the hybrid commercial-nonprofit model that defines WordPress.

The advisory cohort is more conventionally credentialed. Waydo led engineering at a hardware-software health technology company; Van Horn and Shah have both built and exited analytics SaaS businesses. But advisers do not vote, do not carry fiduciary duties, and do not constrain a CEO's decision-making in the way that independent directors theoretically do.

Mullenweg's statement after the announcement was characteristically grandiose: "We are living through times of unprecedented change, possibly a singularity. The next six months will determine the next 20 years of Automattic." The rhetoric is typical of founder-CEOs who have just survived a removal attempt: frame the moment as existential, the stakes as civilisational, the opposition as myopic.

Open Source, Closed Governance

WordPress powers roughly 43 per cent of all websites, according to W3Techs data from August 2026. That share gives Automattic and Mullenweg extraordinary influence over the open web's infrastructure. The WordPress project itself is governed by a separate foundation, but Automattic controls WordPress.com, the largest managed hosting service for the platform, and Mullenweg personally controls the WordPress.org domain and trademark.

The governance fight at Automattic matters beyond the company's own cap table because of that structural position. A board composed of independent directors with deep experience in platform governance and open source might have asked harder questions about the WP Engine litigation strategy, the use of WordPress.org as a competitive lever, or the risks of conflating Automattic's commercial interests with the WordPress project's community obligations. A board of personal acquaintances, unproven operators, and a novelist is less likely to do so.

Mullenweg has not disclosed whether he intends to expand the board further or whether the current four directors constitute the permanent composition. Delaware law permits a board of one, so even the current structure represents more governance formality than legally required for a private company. The real question is whether Automattic's investors, who hold the remaining 16 per cent of voting shares, will accept the new arrangement or push for changes at the next funding round or exit event.

For now, Mullenweg has won. The board that tried to remove him is gone. The legal team that might have advised caution in the WP Engine fight has been replaced. The new directors owe their seats to his favour. What happens in the next six months will test whether that consolidation of control serves Automattic's long-term interests or simply entrenches the preferences of one man at the top.